Author:

Nigel Goldenfeld(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Ecology is fundamentally concerned with the relationship of
organisms to space and time. Thus, it is natural for statistical
physicists to ask if there are universal phenomena, and if so,
how they can be separated from purely idiosyncratic features of
special systems. This talk will focus primarily on fluctuations
in ecosystems, showing how certain well-documented scaling laws,
such as the species-area law, follow from rather general
properties of ecosystems. Fluctuations, especially demographic
noise, drive patterns in space and time, and we will review how
this solves the predator-prey limit cycle paradox, and can
account for the robust occurrence of patchiness in ecosystems.